1. Great Expectations (pg.7)

1. Great Expectations (pg.7): “My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up ‘by hand.’”:
Dickens references Pip's upbringing as "by hand".
The actual meaning of this is that Pip was bottle- fed as a baby and not nursed by his mother or someone else. As Pip was an orphan, he had to be brought up by hand. However, Dickens uses the phrase “by hand” in a more literal sense too; "by hand" meaning Mrs. Joe tended to be abusive. For an example, Dickens describes Mrs. Joe using her “tickler” to punish Pip when he behaved badly. Dickens creates a sense of the background and upbringing that Pip had, and the reader will be sympathetic for his character.

“Great Expectations.” Discovering Dickens, A Community Reading Project. 2002. Stanford University.
http://dickens.stanford.edu/dickens/archive/great/great_issue1gloss.html